United States in 2001

Originally published in the Britannica Book of the Year. Presented as archival content. Learn more.

This article was originally published in the Britannica Book of the Year, an annual print publication that
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Resilience had been a fundamental element of the American character from colonial times, but in 2001 the United States’ ability to recover from adversity was severely tested. Its national economy, weary from years as the engine of world growth, finally slipped into recession. An energy crisis threatened further disruption, producing major bankruptcies. Terrorist attacks on September 11 coupled with a subsequent public health scare sent shock waves across the nation; the dispirited American morale slowed economic activity further, and the U.S. was soon plunged into a distant Asian war against an implacable fundamentalist regime.

Within weeks, however, the country had righted its listing self-confidence. Security measures gradually began restoring trust in public institutions. A series of government economic measures, including 11 interest-rate reductions and substantial emergency spending, established a foundation under the rocky economy. The Taliban regime in Afghanistan was rapidly uprooted and dispersed by a devastating show of American military technology. By year’s end the United States was on the road to recovery, its position as the world’s economic, cultural, and military leader not only restored but burnished in a year of challenges.

Security Crisis

Authorities responded immediately to the September 11 events, bolstering safety measures at public buildings, upgrading screening at airports, freezing assets of groups with suspected terrorist ties, and detaining more than 1,000 noncitizens for questioning. The measures included such extraordinary steps as the granting of authority to air force generals to shoot down hijacked civilian airliners and a provision for wartime military tribunals to try suspected alien terrorists. Some measures prompted criticism from civil liberties groups, but public opinion polls showed that the measures were widely supported.

In a September 20 address to Congress, Pres. George W. Bush announced the creation of an Office of Homeland Security under former Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge to coordinate the antiterrorism efforts of 40 federal agencies. (SeeBiographies.) Within days the new agency confronted a new threat when several employees of a tabloid newspaper publisher in Florida contracted anthrax, an infectious disease ordinarily confined to farm animals, via suspicious mail. Additional anthrax spores were soon discovered in a variety of places, including the offices of Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, post offices, and various news organizations. Most of the spores were traced to mail originating near Trenton, N.J., but a connection to the September 11 terrorism was never established. By year’s end two forms of anthrax had killed 5 persons and sickened 14 and prompted authorities to extend precautionary drug treatment to 32,000 persons and to update inadequate public health emergency-preparedness laws.

Congress approved a variety of measures to counter economic and security concerns following the terrorist attacks; $15 billion was appropriated to assist U.S. airline firms, including $5 billion in grants; lawmakers appropriated an immediate $40 billion in additional spending for a variety of causes, including stepped-up military activity and assistance to affected areas, such as New York City; and President Bush received authority to expend half of the funds at his discretion. Congress also authorized the use of force to respond to the attacks, provided for federal takeover of some 28,000 airport security workers, and approved an antiterrorism law that allowed expanded law-enforcement powers over money laundering, electronic and telephone eavesdropping, and detention of suspected terrorists.

By year’s end the death toll from the attacks had been revised sharply downward. At one point unofficial estimates had projected up to 10,000 deaths in New York and 500 or more at the Pentagon near Washington. Authorities in December, while cautioning that the precise number of deaths might never be known, put the toll at nearly 2,900 in New York City, with an additional 189 at the Pentagon and 44 in Pennsylvania, where another hijacked plane crashed after passengers attempted to overpower the terrorists.

Domestic Issues

The September 11 events proved to be a critical turning point for President Bush and his administration. Bush was inaugurated in January after having lost the popular vote and enjoying the weakest mandate of any recent U.S. president. (SeeSidebar.) Congress was nominally in Republican hands but was almost evenly divided. Bush surprised many observers by pushing an aggressively conservative agenda, including a 10-year, $1.6 trillion tax cut, expanded energy exploration, a faith-based social assistance initiative, and withdrawal from several international treaties.

Following compromise with congressional Democrats, Bush signed an 11-year, $1,350,000,000,000 tax-reduction bill on June 7 that provided instant $300–$600 rebates to most taxpayers, reduced the four major marginal rates, repealed the estate tax, increased the child-care credit, and provided relief for married couples and incentives for savings.

In late May veteran Republican lawmaker Sen. James M. Jeffords of Vermont announced that he would leave the GOP and become an Independent caucusing with Senate Democrats. That turned the Senate, previously divided 50–50 but under Republican organization, over to a 50–49–1 configuration under Democratic control. Jeffords cited disappointment with conservative GOP policies, including inadequate spending for education, and allies noted that the White House had slighted him by failing to invite him to a ceremony honouring a Vermont schoolteacher. With Congress now officially divided along partisan lines, Bush’s agenda bogged down over the summer, and the president, while still enjoying general popular support, was widely viewed as tentative and ineffective in his public appearances.

Within days of September 11, however, Bush had shed that image. He delivered a thoughtful eulogy to victims at the National Cathedral service in Washington, D.C., and won praise for his presence in an early visit to the World Trade Center site. Bush’s September 20 speech to a special joint session of Congress received widespread acclaim for its eloquence and delivery and helped launch Bush’s personal approval ratings in public opinion polls to record levels through the remainder of the year.

During the fall, measures responding to the terrorist assault were approved by Congress with only modest opposition, particularly legislation covering military preparedness and disaster relief. In the realm of ongoing domestic policy, however, entrenched partisan arguments stopped passage of numerous bills, including several that had been debated for years. Among legislation failing to pass Congress during 2001 were the president’s energy security bill (which included oil exploration in an Alaskan wilderness area), campaign finance reform, fast-track trade-negotiation authority, Bush’s faith-based social initiative, an agriculture subsidy bill, a federal patients’ bill of rights, and a fiscal stimulus bill that administration partisans said was vital to the national economic recovery.

At year’s end Congress did approve a compromise education-reform act cosponsored by Democratic Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts. The bill required for the first time annual reading and mathematics testing for students in grades three through eight nationwide. It also required school districts to close the gap between poor and middle-class achievement and mandated that consistently underperforming schools allot part of their federal financial assistance to tutoring or providing transportation to other schools. (SeeEducation: Special Report.)

Debate over the wisdom and ethics of advanced scientific research grew in intensity during the year. The U.S. House of Representatives approved a bill banning cloning of humans from embryos and prohibiting creation of cloned embryos for research, but the Senate delayed the measure. Under pressure to take a position, President Bush announced in August that he would allow federal funding only for research on the approximately 60 colonies of embryo cells that had been already created, saying he did not believe taxpayer dollars should support further destruction of human embryos. A National Academy of Sciences panel quickly published a report detailing problems with the Bush position, and little was settled on the subject.

Recent FBI figures revealed that the incidence of serious crime had remained virtually unchanged following eight years of significant decline. The figures showed a modest 0.3% reduction in seven index crimes during the first half of 2001. On June 11 Timothy McVeigh (seeObituaries)—the main perpetrator of the 1995 Oklahoma City, Okla., bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building that killed 168 persons—was executed at a U.S. prison in Terre Haute, Ind. It was the first federal execution since 1963. A second federal prisoner, Juan Raul Garza, convicted of three 1993 drug-related murders, was put to death eight days later in the same prison.

Republican businessman Michael Bloomberg (seeBiographies) prevailed in the highest-profile election of 2001, the race to succeed Rudolph Giuliani as mayor of New York City. Bloomberg spent a record $69 million of personal funds on the campaign. The year’s most bizarre political story involved the disappearance from Washington, D.C., of a 24-year-old government intern, Chandra Levy, shortly before she was to return home to Modesto, Calif. Her parents hired lawyers and investigators and turned a glaring media spotlight on their hometown congressman, Democratic Rep. Gary Condit, who eventually admitted to a “close relationship” with the missing woman. Levy remained missing at year’s end, and Condit announced that he would launch an uphill bid for reelection.

The Economy

The national economic expansion ended with a whimper during 2001. A panel of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) declared in November that the nation’s economic growth had ended the previous March, exactly 10 years after it had started, which made it the longest-running expansion since the organization began keeping records in 1854. Government figures showed that gross domestic product had increased by a modest 1.2% in the first quarter and an anemic 0.3% in the second, followed by a 1.3% retraction in the third quarter. Though recessions had traditionally been declared after two consecutive quarters of negative growth, NBER economists, noting continued economic deterioration, cited other factors in their assessment.

The trauma of September 11 effectively kicked the national economy while it was down. The events further shook consumer confidence, which had been declining, and markedly reduced personal and business travel, entertainment expenditures, and other economic activity. The national jobless rate, which had bottomed at 3.9% in 2000, had started to climb early in the year; it jumped from 4.9% to 5.4% in October, the biggest one-month jump in two decades. By December unemployment had soared to 5.8%, the highest level in six years. Another victim of the terrorist-exacerbated recession was the short-lived federal budget surplus: after a record $237 billion in black ink during fiscal 2000, the U.S. ended fiscal 2001 on September 30 with a fast-diminishing $127 billion surplus, with many fiscal 2002 projections anticipating a return to deficit spending.

Even so, the recession’s impact was cushioned by several events. Fearing an overexuberant stock market and inflation, the nation’s Federal Reserve System had nudged up interest rates six times in 1999–2000. In 2001, however, the Fed sharply reversed field and lowered its key federal funds rate on 11 occasions, from 6.5% to 1.75%, in a desperate attempt to revive the failing national economy. The actions provided a ripple effect that lowered borrowing costs across the board for credit cards, mortgages, and businesses. Additionally, as the recession reduced energy demand, oil prices began dropping worldwide, providing further relief to consumers. The nation’s major automobile manufacturers began offering no-interest loans in a successful effort to maintain high demand, and new auto sales continued through the last months of 2001 at record levels. The federal government further contributed with cash tax rebates and at least $60 billion in emergency spending following the terrorist attacks.

By year’s end some economists were predicting imminent resumption of national economic expansion. Two major measurements of consumer confidence were rising sharply in December. The Dow Jones Industrial Average, which had dipped as low as 8,235 in the wake of September 11, finished the year over 10,000 and rising. The national inflation rate dropped back to a modest 2.6%, and productivity gains remained strong, which led several economists to predict an end to the recession as the country put memories of the attacks behind it.

The recession helped avoid a widely predicted energy disaster in California and neighbouring states. As the year began, California was suffering under a mishandled deregulation of electricity that led to severe power shortages and the bankruptcy of a major state public utility. Rolling blackouts plagued the state during January, and many analysts predicted further outages and economic disruption during the summer, when air-conditioner use would be high. A combination of state government assistance to the utilities, a cool summer, upgrading of electrical distribution line efficiency, reduced usage due to recession and conservation, and the worldwide energy surplus largely prevented serious incidents.

During the height of the crisis, California Gov. Gray Davis denounced out-of-state energy companies for taking advantage of the state and its consumers, and he specifically named the Houston, Texas-based Enron Corp. Late in 2001 Enron—the seventh largest American corporation, with over $100 billion in revenue in 2000—filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The company, listing $49.5 billion in assets, became the largest company in U.S. history to go under. The failure was only tangentially related to its long-running exploitation of deregulated markets for wholesale natural gas and electricity. Analysts discovered that key company officials, while operating largely unregulated marketplaces trading derivative energy contracts, were simultaneous running private off-book partnerships and profiting personally, even while they overstated Enron profits. The company’s failure was particularly hard on employees, many of whom had retirement funds tied up in near-worthless company stock.

The world’s leading software company, Microsoft Corp., avoided a court-ordered breakup by settling its antitrust case with the Bush administration Justice Department. The company had been found guilty of monopolistic practices in a case brought by the Bill Clinton administration and ordered divided into at least two parts. An appeals court panel in June confirmed that Microsoft had monopoly power but disqualified the original trial judge for injudicious comments outside the courtroom. After Microsoft allowed computer makers to disable some parts of its Windows operating system and replace them with software from other firms, the replacement judge approved a settlement allowing the company to stay intact.

Foreign Policy

Within hours of the September 11 attacks, the Bush administration began preparations for a military assault on the al-Qaeda network in Afghanistan and started assembling international support for the mission. The U.S. received immediate and strong support from British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who helped the U.S. rally world opinion. The partners took pains to assure that it was international terrorists and their protectors who were targets, not Islam. In the end some 60 countries offered tangible assistance, including Muslim Pakistan as well as Russia, which provided access to military bases in nearby Tajikistan. The U.S. doubled its military presence in the region to 50,000 during the month the hostilities began.

Demands that the Afghan Taliban regime locate and turn over Osama bin Laden (seeBiographies) to international forces were met by evasion, then refusal. U.S.-dominated military action started with cruise missile, bomber, and fighter jet attacks throughout Afghanistan on October 7, followed by continued military operations in support of the Northern Alliance Afghan resistance fighters. At the beginning U.S. preparations were met by a hailstorm of criticism and doubts; critics suggested that Americans would be repeating Russian mistakes in Afghanistan or would be bogged down in a Vietnam-style Asian conflict. Instead, the operation was largely completed in 11 weeks as the Taliban was driven from power, replaced by a UN-brokered coalition; Bin Laden’s fighting forces, which included Arabs, Pakistanis, and Chechens, were killed or dispersed.

In his September 20 congressional speech, President Bush declared, “From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the U.S. as a hostile regime.” By year’s end neither Bin Laden nor Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar had been located. While continuing to search for Taliban and al-Qaeda leadership in the area, the U.S. turned its attention toward other countries facilitating terrorist activity. The ongoing confrontation with rogue organizations and states, especially those believed to be developing chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons, continued to dominate world affairs.

Cooperation on Afghanistan was a highlight of improved U.S. relations with Russia. In mid-November, Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin visited Washington and Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas. Talks appeared promising when Putin said he would consider allowing the U.S. to test a missile defense system even though the test would be an apparent violation of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, provided the two countries could agree on nuclear weapons reductions. Bush announced that the U.S. would slash nuclear warheads from 7,000 to the 1,700–2,200 range over the next decade, and Putin hinted at similar reductions in the Russian 5,800-warhead arsenal. The two were never able to hammer out an agreement on the antimissile test, however, and in December Bush announced that the U.S. would withdraw from the treaty and thereby leave the way open for missile defense testing.

The long-running U.S. effort to broker a lasting peace in the Middle East appeared to collapse during the year. Talks between Israeli and Palestinian leaders sponsored by former president Clinton had fallen apart in late 2000, producing violence that escalated during 2001. After a period of inaction, the Bush administration attempted to revive talks but without success, and after September 11 Israeli advocates successfully likened Palestinian bombing and assaults to the terrorist attacks in the U.S. President Bush pointedly declined to condemn Israeli military responses against the Palestinian population and refused to meet with Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat.

Free-trade advocates scored a major advance at an international meeting in Doha, Qatar, when major countries agreed to begin a new three-year round of trade negotiations. The talks would be aimed at reducing agricultural trade barriers and industrial tariffs. The U.S. made concessions, putting its antidumping law under review in spite of opposition from American steel interests and agreeing that less-developed nations could override drug patents in the interests of public health. Most analysts declared that no new trade agreement could be negotiated, however, unless the U.S. Senate voted fast-track negotiating authority to President Bush. The U.S. normalized trade relations with China during the year after having cleared the way for China’s membership in the World Trade Organization.

During 2001 the focus of war concerns shifted to Asia, including Afghanistan. U.S. military efforts aggravated the decades-long conflict between India and Pakistan, and the two countries, both possessing nuclear weapons, were at the brink of war at year’s end. Ironically, in an effort to encourage cooperation in the Afghan operation, the U.S. had lifted sanctions imposed on both countries following their 1998 nuclear tests. Problems with North Korea, one of the world’s last communist regimes, continued to fester and led to periodic threats of war against the U.S. and its allies, including Japan.

The Bush administration’s efforts to build a coalition to support military measures in Afghanistan reversed what critics had labeled U.S. rejection of international solutions to world problems, including its refusal to sign the ABM Treaty and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Earlier in the year the Bush administration had officially rejected the Kyoto Protocol, suggesting that the anti-global-warming treaty would affect the global economy disproportionately. In late summer the U.S. sent a delegation to the UN World Conference Against Racism in Durban, S.Af., but walked out in protest against proposed conference resolutions calling for reparations to blacks for slavery and for condemnation of Israel for alleged racism against Palestinians.